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CITY MULTIPLI CITY MULTIPLI CITY MULTIPLI CITY MULTIPLI CITY MULTIPLI CITY a reading of the rhizomatic nature of Mumbai

Anuj Daga | French Theory: Sartre to Derrida | Prof. Yue Zhuo | Fall 2012

Would like to pick up my paper

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In truth it is enough to say, “Long live the multiple”

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Introduction: Rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Urban conditions in megacities like Mumbai, India, have grown organically and in the present

times, evolved to an extent where the city spaces seem to be extremely chaotic. Traditional

architectural methods of cartography and drawings that are used to map these conditions for

purposes of engaging and intervening into them remain insufficient in embracing the overall

spirit of the city. While the city administrative systems try to bring order into such urban

complexity by segregating activities and regularizing boundaries, I argue here that it is this pulse

of the place that constitutes the city and its culture – it has to be acknowledged, encouraged

and intervened through logics beyond the rational1. This paper aims to present a contemporary

reading of the city of Mumbai by documenting in detail the Dadar2 station precinct, through

which it demonstrates an understating of the conceptual density of Deleuze and Guattari’s

theory of ‘Rhizome’ from ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. Subsequently, it

suggests using ‘Rhizome’ as a lens to understand and intervene into the complex character of

the city.

The Dadar station precinct is one of the busiest areas in Central Mumbai and encounters

several actors using, negotiating, creating and recreating the same space at any given time.

The train station3 divides the suburb of Dadar into an eastern and western side. Both these

sides ramify into several lanes which ultimately disperse people into the city. A detailed

description of this area shall bring forth how different actors play out, interact and bring the city

to life, infact, keep it alive all the time. The way in which cultural, social, political and economic

systems behave in this area are absolutely amorphous, organic and entangled. They depend on

each other as well as create them; they form each other while being detached. Spaces unfold,

1 Modernistic planning principles of zoning based on empirical understanding and analysis. 2 Dadar is a nodal junction on the western suburban train corridor in Mumbai, which is also an exchange terminal for the transit passengers for the central and harbor train corridors. 3 The principal mode of transport in Mumbai are the three North-South train corridors – the Western, Central and harbor lines. Dadar lies on the western line, forms a junction with the central line and becomes a point of interchange for the harbor line railway.

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multiply and double up intensities giving the city a form that cannot be imagined or represented

cartographically.

Along the four major lanes that comprise the precinct outside the station, the cycle of events

begin early morning by 5:00 am. Trucks bring in fresh vegetables from the city outskirts,

spreading out into a street as a wholesale market. The early morning traffic intersects this

market, and buyers, sellers, policemen, residents taking an early morning jog - all activities

overlap and negotiate their space within this market. Within half an hour, the trucks are gone,

the sellers are gone and the area is taken over by a swarm of municipal authority trucks which

clean up the leftovers and prepare it for the traffic that shall take over it during the day.

On the other side, a thriving flower market arranges itself under a fly-over that runs closely

parallel to the train station. Flowers are essential components for religious activities,

worshipping, decorating, gifting and even an important accessory that traditional Indian women

like to decorate themselves with. Therefore, each kind of flower is converted into something else

- bouquets, garlands of various sizes, assortments by a distinct agency of workers who line up

along this market. Another set of basket makers in cane, plastic and wires assist the flower

making enterprise by setting their shops opposite to these flower arrangers. The whole part

works like a machine, a mini industry. On another parallel street merging and fading into the

flower market, by 6 am, newspaper sellers who distribute newspapers, magazines and tabloids

across the city gather to receive bundles of stock from the press trucks. The stacks of papers

are counted, regrouped, assorted and prepared into new bundles to be delivered to newspaper

stalls and various households. The stacks of newspapers form small shop-like enclosures

around which early college-goers meander to cut across to get to the taxi stands. These pseudo

shops vanish within hours as the newspapers are distributed and sold off. Fruit vendors occupy

the same space, although in a new configuration of small pedestals for seating and keeping

their baskets using the emptied soft wood or plastic fruit boxes. Hawkers selling quick morning

snacks set up their stalls to serve the office going crowd that is soon about to inundate the

streets.

By 9 am all streets seemingly expand to allow a surge of office-goers to reach the taxi stand

from the station in one direction and from the city to the train station in the other. There are no

one-way rules that regulate movement. All lanes are two-way. Anyone can choose to take any

lane to move in any of the directions. Amongst these people are those who are commuting,

selling, buying, eating, waiting, talking, gossiping… The place becomes a collection of

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momentary events – a happening. The fruit sellers, hawkers, flower markets secure their own

territories yet allowing all other activity. Seemingly conflicting programs overlap each other, but

no boundaries are defined. Each activity supports the other, at the same time disturbs another.

Across the taxi-stand is a multi-religious roadside shrine that houses Hindu as well as Christian

deities with a mosque opposite side. All sorts of worshippers wait across the street, pray for a

moment and leave the spot. The temple virtually extends beyond the road, creating a religious

zone constantly inflicted by the busy traffic. Soon shops on the streets extend out their opened

doors which become extra surfaces for displaying their own products. The streets look dressed

in a multitude of textures and smells of the early morning incense and the just closing country

side liquor bar mix up to create an ambivalent ambience. This affectsand alters the trails that

people make through the pavements. The afternoon sees the same street taken over by sellers

of plastic wares, household items, everyday utensils, toys and all sorts of things laid out on the

street. Early evening sees the same space replaced by vegetable vendors from whom people

purchase grocery on their way back home. Since it is dark, these vendors pull out electric

cables borrowed from the retail shops that lie behind them for lighting their shops. A herd of

people again go through this busy enterprise making their way to the railway station in order to

take the trains back home. In the night, scavengers and stray dogs or cats appear cleaning up

the leftover food stuff on the street and the shop plinths become beds for the homeless.

All this while, resources are shared, created and reinvented. Awnings of legal shops within

building premises extend to shade and embrace tea stalls or the pan-wallahs4 and fast food

hawkers on the pavement who service back the shop owners and their clients on a preference

basis. Several other retail shops and hawkers guard each other’s territories – claims are

reserved through kinship relationships that automatically induce sense of social security.

Concessions and barters for each others’ services and goods are often negotiated. The retail

shops become refuges for the hawkers’ items and goods when the municipal corporation van

surprisingly arrives to evict those without a hawking ticket. Other times, the police is one

amongst those who depend on these hawking zones. Residents, shop-owners, street users and

passers-by come together to contribute small sums of money during religious festivals creating

temporary covered enclosures that wrap up these very lanes where a variety of events like

worship, dance and music for week long celebrations take place. Ropes are tied across the

open balconies across the street. The balconies overlook the street and often communications

are made across the vertical plane of the street through call outs or sign boards. Lighting runs

across the street-light poles during such festivals, or political events like elections or

4 a roadside shop for betel leaf preparation

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campaigning. The entire geography is rearranged to accommodate newer events throughout the

year.

In the above process, urban space constantly transforms to manage disparate flows of people

and events in the same space. Time mediates densities of people and events; it expands and

contracts space, varying intensities of phenomena. Time slows down to expand space, as if

making the place viscous. It opens up as if unfolding pleats of matter5 to reveal more and more

of itself, endlessly, infinitely. It could be said that space and time multiply to contain more and

more activities. The spaces fold into each other, coalesce and thenfragment again. This space

is filled with inconsistencies – it is completely heterogeneous. The individual enterprises are like

abstract machines - while remaining plugged on to one system for their survival, they are

waiting to connect and combine with other in case the first system collapses. All infrastructure

on the pavements – the flower beds, large pots, curbs, light poles, sign boards are used up as

tactical equipment that facilitate activities like keeping, hanging, tucking, tagging, sticking,

clamping, hoisting all kinds of things required for any enterprise. The overall assembly is layered

and thickly textured. There are no formal connections between any of these enterprises, no

papers are signed, no leases are hardened. Every aspect is flexible and keeps changing as per

the individual’s desires and compulsions.

Each block with buildings, that define the streets have some or the other prominent institutions

like schools, libraries, music schools, commercial facilities, coaching centers that suck in and

throw out public into urban space in different capacities. They draw in people and throw them

back into different corners of the city. Multiple larger networks are formed, through which the city

is stretched, pulled, transported and expanded. A web or relations govern the system, where

each strand feeds the other.

The urban form is far from conceivable, yet it exists. The numerous invisible and temporal

boundaries that get formed and eroded every day keep changing the perception of the city. At

times the city seems violent, other times it may be joyful, sometimes silent or it could be

extremely loud – all conditions may exist even simultaneously. Since each hawker describes a

boundary using his own infrastructure combining tactically with that of the city, boundaries

between the built form and the pavement to the road are absolutely blurred. Since they are

never permanent, it is hard to map them or fixate them. Further, flows of people, goods and

even mobile shops create a dynamic, ever changing sense of boundary. Thus, urban form is

5 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’

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constantly morphing and has no singular image. Urban researcher Prasad Shetty summarizes

this condition for Mumbai:

“The city seems nicely messy with an overlap of objects, activities and smells. Its logic gets

structured through numerous and simultaneous claims: of shop owners, two feet shop keepers,

vendors, pedestrians, car owners, buyers, and of causal walkers. Its form is shaped by constant

morphing and mutation of building envelopes, plot shapes and street edges where boundaries

are made, erased and remade continuously. This is the context of blurry claims and forms, where

much of the city – its enterprise, property relationships and much of its life – gets worked out. It is

these blurry conditions that not only make the city, but are the city.”6

Many areas of the city experienceimmense friction, overlap, roughness due to rubbing of these

invisible and effervescent boundaries, sometimes also causingabuse, dirt, mutation of physical

surroundings – but it is all such fluxthatproduces an extremelyvibrant urban condition. This

‘mess’ is incomprehensible to the city planners and is often seen in contrast to the aesthetic

visions of the clear, clean and neatly bounded cities that epitomize their imaginations of beauty

and resultant ideal city visions. The city government constantly strives to segregate strands of

this complex network and interrelationships of people that exist in a single space. Such

decisions produce undesired tensions in the already frictional cityspace. For example, the

hawkers in Dadar station precinct are under a constant threat to be moved away by the police -

the vendors run with their markets whenever they see the hint of a police pick up van. The news

of a police pickup van’s arrival spreads like wildfire, creating a domino wave of shop-lifting. In

addition, the government wants to segregate commuters and buyers in order to achieve clarity

of form…They do not acknowledge that the hawkers’ existence is validsince a significant portion

of the commuting population through this area feeds onto them and thus both satisfy each

other’s needs. It is a natural market driven by natural processes of demand and supply – the

geography in which such activities manifest is apt.In this caseit works due to the centralized

location of Dadar and the precinct that falls between the everyday thoroughfare of people while

they travel from their homes to workplaces or vice versa. Also, hawkers are able to commute to

a nodal center from the city fringes.

The city government wants to segregate pedestrians from the buyers (that is, people who only

use the street to pass through versus those who wait at different spots along the street to shop)

and often, grand proposals of mega projects like the ‘skywalks’ are proposed, which intrude into

the informal, non-physical activities as static infrastructure which seems incongruent with many

6 Prasad Shetty, ‘Of blurry claims and forms’, Paper published in SEMINAR-636, August 2012

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aspects concerning the city’s ecology of events as described in the essay. It has been studied

that intervention of such recent mega infrastructure projects in other busy parts of the city have

neither satisfied the aesthetic aspiration of the public, nor produced desired consequences

towards an effective segregation leaving the city with an underused cumbersome infrastructure.

In addition, the civic bodies want to remove hawkers from this area – they constantly confiscate

their goods, imprison them or charge heavy fines on these hawkers further pressing their

financial crisis. All such actions are carried out in the pursuit of achieving a cognizable urban

form. It can thus be asserted that any attempts at producing conventional architecture in such

intense conditions of the city seem to reduce its vitality and suppress its energy. While the city

wants to grow, conventional planning logic tends to reduce; while the city wants to multiply,

making hard boundarydivides; while the city spaces overlap, architecture wants to segregate.

The resistance between what the city wants to be and what architecture wants it to become

produces an incoherent reality that designers and city officials constantly want to sort out.

Conclusion The simultaneous processes described above multiply as the space time dynamics interact with

each other. Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of Rhizome effectively helps us in

understanding these conditions and conceptualizing such space against the modern rational

and structural frameworks. Mumbai is full of such rhizomatic conditions – extremely knotty,

intertwined and layered with networks of work and life. The contention of the paper is to accept

this theory as a model through which we start looking at the city, in order to intervene into these

conditions such that urban life nurtures, and is not suppressed through teleological imaginations

of a perfect city. Rhizomatic conditions are essential since they are accommodating of people’s

desires and aspirations and allow for resilience as well as social and economic security of a

place. Such a condition preserves culture in its pack form, releasing it at appropriate intervals,

when the city can absorb and digest it and reinvent it. Architects who are obsessed with

ordering and structuring the built environment need to rethink their roles as a part of this

network rather than trying to simplify it.

“Traditional practices and theories for analyzing and planning cities using deterministic methods

and linear projections into the future are based on the assumption that the results are always

articulated and predictable. Deriving from this approach, the numerous major ‘modernization’

schemes have been realized using tools and processes that are insensitive to local

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specificities.”7 It is true that different bodies have different interests from the current space.

Modern planning strategies like zoning, segregation, classification are aimed at reducing the

immense frictionby isolating all activities from each other. However, “frictionless space designed

to accelerate throughput will obviously not have the same effect as a more consciously arresting

space, but that does not warrant the conclusion that it is either affectless orineffable.”8

In the postscript on The Societies of Control, Deleuze says that “The different internments or

spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time

one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists,

it is analogical. On the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations,

forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't

necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinctcastings, but controls are a modulation,

like a self-deforming cast that will continuouslychange from one moment to the other, or like a

sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.”9

Extrapolating from the above, the plane of Dadar lies outside of the Cartesian grid. Inherent in

its nature is the rhizomatic disposition. It needs to multiply itself constantly. One must allow it to

take its own form while people twist and turn their bodies through the invisible boundaries that

get formed. In such bendings is a becoming of the city. It is multiplicity that cities are meant for.

And in truth, it is enough to say, “Long live the multiple”10

7 Guido Musante,Mobility, movement, flow, http://mooove.com/audi-urban-future-initiative 8 Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, Space in the age of Non-place, Deleuze and Space, p.22 9 Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the societies of control 10 Gilles Deleuze, Introduction: Rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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Image1: Taxis, pedestrians, buyers, sellers, hawkers, flowers, vegetables, fruits, eateries, advertisements…

Image2: Newspapers, incenses, planters, cartons, enterprises, buyers, sellers, passers-by,vehicles…

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Image3: Parking, moving, talking, eating, buying, selling, waiting, seeing, peeping….

Image4: Flyover, railway station, thoroughfares, crossing, cutting, mixing, intertwining…

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Image5: Multiplying multiplicities

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Bibliography and References: Buchanan, Ian and Gregg Lambert ed., Space in the age of Non-place, Deleuze and Space. University of

Toronto Press, 2005

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, Introduction: Rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. edited by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987

Deleuze, Gilles, The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, University Of Minnesota Press, 1992

Deleuze, Gilles, Postscript on the societies of control, The MIT Press, October, Vol. 59. (Winter,

1992), retrieved from JSTOR

Kafka, Franz, The Burrow, Collected Stories. Everyman's Library, 1993

Musante, Guido, Mobility, movement, flow, accessed December 5, 2012.http://mooove.com/audi-urban-

future-initiative

Shetty, Prasad, ‘Of blurry claims and forms’, Paper published in SEMINAR-636, August 2012,retrieved

fromhttp://cityscans.wordpress.com/urbanism/of-blurry-claims-and-forms/